Monthly Archives: December 2012

Last December fragment, last daily post (back to occasional now), last day of the year—conventionally, a time for resolutions. I’m still working on mine, but I’m going to avoid the impossible ones this year. The painful ones. The ones involving denial and doom. You know, things like giving up chocolate. Taking more time for watching the world, for looking up, looking down—maybe I can manage that. I hope yours, whatever they may be, will bring you as much pleasure.

Have a happy, transcendent New Year. See you in 2013!

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination…

Fair price? (I don’t this is the sole province of writers. I have artist friends who would agree.)

Before I entered publishing, I believed, like most people, that the life of a writer was to be envied. As one of my heroes, Truman Capote, wrote, ‘When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip.’ Now I understand that writers are a breed apart, their gifts and their whips inextricably linked.

Humans are not empty organisms, free spirits constrained only by the limits of our imaginations or, more prosaically, by the social and economic determinants within which we live, think and act. Nor are we reducible to ‘nothing but’ machines for the replication of our DNA. We are, rather, the products of the constant dialectic between ‘the biological’ and ‘the social’ through which humans have evolved, history has been made and we as individuals have developed.

… it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

I love this comment from Chad W. Post, of Open Letter Books, a US publisher specialising in works in translation. I was to have taken part (with fellow Ledig House residents Saskya Jain, India; Andrés Felipe Solano, Colombia; and F.G. Haghenbeck, Mexico) in a reading sponsored by Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester in November 2012—until Cyclone Sandy came along!

We [at Open Letter Books] believe books are most interesting when they embody the power to change and open minds—and that this is worth valuing over sales potential.

How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? There can be a chain of forgetting, the rubbing away of previous ownership as much as the slow accretion of stories.